Aberedw

The Edw joins the Wye here through a short steep gorge, and the rocks above it are the best crag scenery in Radnorshire — broken limestone and gritstone ledges, scrub oak, and a great deal of quiet.

Francis Kilvert loved it and said so repeatedly. He asked to be buried at Aberedw, and was not.

The castles

There are two, which confuses people.

The earthwork castle is a motte and bailey of the eleventh or twelfth century on a spur above the village. The stone castle is a separate later site nearby, of which very little remains — much of it was destroyed when the Mid-Wales Railway was built through the valley in the 1860s.

Both were held by the Marcher lordship structure that ran along the middle Wye, and neither was of the first importance.

December 1282

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd is traditionally said to have sheltered in a cave in the rocks above Aberedw in the days before his death, and the place is still called Llywelyn's Cave.

The associated stories — that the local smith shod his horse backwards to disguise the tracks, and was afterwards hanged for it — belong to the same body of tradition and are the sort of detail that accumulates round a national loss.

The rock fall that is pointed out as the cave was partly destroyed by railway construction, which has not stopped anybody.

The church

St Cewydd's is medieval, with a good fifteenth-century screen, an old door with original ironwork, and a roof worth looking up at.

It is small, plain and unrestored to a degree that is unusual, and it is one of the more atmospheric parish churches in the county.

Around

Builth Wells is four miles north, and Cilmeri, where Llywelyn was killed, is three miles beyond it on the Llanwrtyd road. The monument there is a rough granite monolith set up in 1956, easy to miss from the road, and people still leave flowers on it every December.

The Wye Valley Walk passes through the parish, and the rocks above the village are open access and worth the climb for the view down the gorge.